Voices from the Harlem Renaissance Book

I read this not because I'm into wars or war poetry, but because while I've read plenty of WWI poetry, I've been pretty ignorant of that produced by WWII. For a 250-page anthology, I thought this was an excellent primer.

I supposed my ignorance of WWII poetry owed mostly to it having had less time to be canonized than WWI work. Having read this book, I believe that ignorance is due to another factor as well: the well-known poets of the First War were largely highly educated British officers who considered their kind to have become a brotherhood. Their poems are marked by a sense of brotherhood, piety, and patriotism that is lacking in this book. Its contributors are mostly American, mostly military, mostly enlisted.

Missing is the glory of "In Flanders Fields" -- these poems are more modern in style, and, as the editor notes, "This is not a book of celebration, unless it is to celebrate man's ability, indeed his compulsion, to turn terror into art." This art is beautiful, but modern in theme as well: the poems reflect the terror-inducing, fragmented, inchoate, blasphemous nature of the new Machine, which used (& uses) tools like airplanes and cinema to distance man from man and man from his actions.

Simone Weil claimed that war poems are about force: "that X that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him."

I'm going to go take the dog for a walk, exorcise the nightmares from my brain, thank God for my country & those who serve it, and pray for peace, a peace that can only come with His Coming. Until He returns, I'm thankful for poets like these, whose vision illuminates the dark road ahead, and reminds me to fight to remain human(e).